When Nicola Robinson started nursing in Manchester in 1987, she never saw children with type 2 diabetes; HIV was effectively a death sentence, and patients didn’t arrive on the ward having self-diagnosed from Google, ready to question their treatment. Almost 40 years later, the patients in front of her are very different.
“People are living longer, the way we manage long-term conditions is different, and patients have more access to information,” says Robinson, now 57. “They can be more vocal about what they want.” She has watched childhood obesity become a growing issue during her career, something she says simply wasn’t part of the picture when she trained.
“Since Covid, we’re definitely seeing it more in children. When I trained, there were just type 1 diabetic children who were born not producing insulin, but in the noughties we started seeing obesity creeping up and now children are presenting with preventable type 2 diabetes.
“There’s also been a decline in vaccine uptake in children. In the 90s, we saw children die of meningitis where now people just think it’s a small virus. I don’t think they realise the devastation it can cause. I think the Covid vaccine made a lot of people lose faith in the immunisation programme. We had a big measles campaign here in 2025 as we’ve lost the status of being a measles-free country. I think we’ll see these illnesses come back because parents just aren’t taking their children for immunisation.”
Across her career, she has also seen HIV treatment transformed from a diagnosis associated with death into a condition people can lead long lives with. Technology has changed her role and medicine has advanced for long-term conditions like asthma and COPD.
Her new book, A Memoir of a Manchester Nurse, charts almost four decades of working in the NHS, from her student days on hospital wards to paediatric intensive care, general practice and prison nursing. She describes the 80s as a “very different world” of matrons who ran wards smoothly, perfectly made hospital beds, paper records and nurses who would spend time talking to patients.
One of the biggest changes she has witnessed is the patients themselves. Today, they are better informed and more willing to question the NHS, she says. They can research symptoms before seeing a doctor, compare services and arrive with expectations about the treatment they should receive, but Robinson doesn’t see that entirely negatively: “I think patients are better informed which is good, really.”
She remembers wards with seven nurses working a shift. Today, she says, there might only be two trained nurses on a single ward. “Nurses don’t have the time to sit by a patient’s bedside like we did, they just don’t have the manpower to do that.”
But at least there’s now a cap on how many hours staff can work. In the 80s, she recalls junior doctors working 72-hour shifts. “In those days, house officers or junior doctors would arrive on Friday and finish on Monday and they’d be physically and mentally exhausted.” Since 2009, though, junior doctors cannot work more than an average of 48 hours a week, and shifts are capped at 13 hours. Nurses have also been legally entitled to at least 11 consecutive hours of rest in any 24-hour period, and cannot be forced to work more than 48 hours a week since 1998.
The role of nursing has expanded dramatically throughout Robinson’s career. As patients live longer, they are often living with multiple long-term conditions, requiring nurses to have a much broader and more specialised knowledge. Nurses can now specialise in areas such as colposcopy (an examination to look at the cervix if abnormal cell changes are found) and prescribe medication – responsibilities that weren’t part of her job when she began. “I think we’re now more like experts. Our roles have extended, so we do an awful lot more; we’re like advanced practitioners.”
Robinson has worked in multiple NHS sectors, including prison nursing during the pandemicThe increasing demands of the job, paired with unfulfilled posts, has taken time away between nurses and patients that would have, before, built a bond. In her book, Robinson recalls the evening routine of washing patients, helping them settle for the night, offering drinks and making sure they were comfortable. When Robinson was just 18, on her first placement, she would spend half an hour chatting to an elderly lady about her love of books and poetry. Afterwards she’d change her dressings.
This patient was also her first experience of death. “At the age of 18, I was in complete shock and sadness that she had been on her own,” she writes. Robinson was called “naive” and told to pull herself together. It’s something that student nurses today have very differently. “When students get placements, they’re quite protected. We were prepared to do ward rounds, drug rounds, ward management, but students are a lot more nurtured now; it’s more gentle. I’m sure it’s probably a culture shock for them, but we do have things in place; there’s more support.”
One of Robinson’s first placements was in a mental health institution. She recalls that one woman “wandered the corridors aimlessly. At the age of 17, she had become pregnant but was unmarried and, like so many women in the 1960s, her baby was taken from her after giving birth. She had postnatal depression and her family put her into psychiatric care. Her time in the hospital turned out to be a lifetime.”
There was more than one occasion that Robinson was told to toughen up. After a child the age of seven or eight passed away after a road accident in the intensive care unit she was working on as a student, she was “visibly upset”. “The sister in charge took me into the office, gave me a hot cup of tea and sat me down. She was kind but blunt and very straight to the point. It was the second time I was told death was part of the job and I needed to toughen up if I wanted a long career in nursing.”
It’s something that graduates and newly qualified nurses get support with now, but back then it was more straight to the point. “Unless you have witnessed death, broken bad news to a relative or sat at a dying patient’s bedside, you can never fully comprehend the magnitude of feelings you experience. Grief is a terrible thing that you cannot prepare for,” she writes in her book.
Something she believes nurses need to be equipped with is resilience. Her own career has shown her how emotionally and physically demanding the profession can be, especially in paediatric intensive care. “You’d be with families for several weeks and then a child would die, or a child might die in a short time. I found that really stressful. One Christmas, there were three deaths, just one after another on one shift, and after that I knew then that I was done with intensive care. I couldn’t give any more of myself emotionally.”
Nursing has never been an easy career, and while the diseases, treatments and patients have changed, Robinson believes the fundamental purpose of nursing has not. “The crux of nursing is kindness and compassion,” she says.
‘A Manchester Nurse’s Memoir’ by Nicola Robinson is out now and available to buy on Amazon
Hence then, the article about i ve been a nurse for 40 years i never saw obese children when i started was published today ( ) and is available on inews ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( I’ve been a nurse for 40 years. I never saw obese children when I started )
Also on site :
- Paige DeSorbo on Healing From Domestic Violence With Her Pet: ‘Sometimes the Thing That Helps You Feel Safe Again Has Four Paws’
- Lacey Chabert Has Starred in a Whopping 45 Hallmark Movies: Which Is Her All-Time Favorite? (Exclusive)
- Before Believing Self-Criticism, Try the ‘Friendship Test,’ a Psychotherapist’s Transformative Rule for Fixing Harsh Self-Talk